The Sublime as Boundary Experience of Nature

In this paper I will consider the sublime an aesthetic category not only naming but symptomatically expressing and interpreting an experience of boundaries that reveals our relating to nature, and I will attempt to explore the possibility of this alternative notion of the sublime. First, I will use this approach for a critical reading of the Kantian sublime, and its postmodern counterpart in Lyotard’s thought, and I will introduce the notion of the sublime understood as boundary-experience. Second, based on some Heideggerian insights I will show how this aesthetic experience is rooted in underlying ontological questions. Third, I will reveal the existential implications of conceptualizing the sublime as a boundary experience of nature.

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